Content Storage Strategies Part One: The Big Switch

2014 included an important milestone: internet users resoundingly showed their acceptance of file storage in the cloud despite absolutely huge threat events that we thought might put the brakes on.

Naturally, the 2013 Snowden leak of government data was the most dramatic — but also the most unlikely. Breaching a security agency makes everything seem less protected. But how many of us have the skills and opportunity to tunnel through that much security or even see a tunnel? Therefore, when you think about it, what are the chances that we are exposed to many such people at all?

Nonetheless, the fact that it happened and was not just a movie script made everyone sit up straight and think about things. And by the way, the scary part is that one person like Snowden could reach millions of other people; it doesn’t take very many experts to reach all of us.

Much closer to home, anyway, had been the earlier, incredible 2012 breach of journalist Matt Honan’s numerous “chained” online accounts involving Apple, Amazon, Twitter and Google, a horror story told in detail through Wired Magazine. Is there someone who does not use Apple, Amazon, Twitter OR Google? And the number of people who don’t use three of the four may be an even smaller number than the number of Snowden-level experts.

But also in 2013, Evernote had bad news for 50 million users when it was hacked. This was a different spin on things than was the alarming number of breaches of proprietary corporate systems, but after all, no Evernote “customer” controls Evernote’s security any more than Target’s or, now, SONY’s customers control those repositories and networks.

Ironically, even with the above “dark clouds” hanging over us, the fragility and cost of our own habits in sorting, organizing and saving information turns out to make online data storage better to have than to not have. We’ve looked at ourselves and decided which pain we would rather keep and which one to escape.

Now the matter is more about the ups and downs of what pain reliever to take. The problem with pain relievers is that great ones may require a prescription so they’re difficult to freely share, and mixing different ones is often a big No No for one reason or another.

However, those issues have hardly held anyone back.

So, the good news is that you can pretty much count on lots of things that matter to someone being in cloud storage instead of on a scrambled, failed, lost, stolen, or proprietary device.